How much worse will Windowsmedia online database get?
I've remarked
before on a case of Windowsmedia reporting different album information according to whether or not you click the "Find Album Info" or "View Album Info" buttons in Windows Media Player v10. Today I picked up a copy of the latest
Verve remixes, and threw it into the computer to rip to Lossless WMA.
WMP didn't automatically pick up the album details, but when I clicked the Find Album Info button, it showed the correct album "Various Artists - Verve Remixed, Vol.3" ... but no track information was included (or album art). Which makes me wonder why AMG even bothers to put the information into the database. I ran a search on "Verve Remixed" but did not find any other records for this, Volume 3. So I returned to the original record, edited the tracks manually and uploaded the details.
Out of curiosity, I clicked the "Find Album Info" - this time I get a different record returned which has all the track titles (but still no album art). Note, these are NOT the ones I uploaded, as I included the remix information in the titles.
It makes me wonder further, if Microsoft and AMG et.al. collectively can't give a damn about maintaining these databases or getting the search code to work, why WMP is not opened up to allow access to other information sources. Since WMP is an integral part of Windows (as we hear so often and so strenuously from Microsoft), doesn't the tying of album-links to a single database basically amount to the same thing as smart-tags redirecting one to a proprietary Microsoft back-end?